The debt limit deal is done, for better or worse. The haggling and hissing will continue ad infinitum. So it goes.

Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking about the other kind of debt limit we all juggle — let’s call it Emotional Debt. It is a very hard time for many of us who are used to some basic niceties. Easily available health care (just try to find a doctor). A living space that doesn’t cost more than we make. Enough food so everyone eats.

I think of Emotional Debt as a bag of gold nuggets. The whole idea is simple: nuggets in and nuggets out to maintain some kind of balance between happiness, love, anger, hate. Right now, those base emotions are on the rise.

Living in this fractious world is no piece of cake. Do you huddle at home and always wear a mask when you must rabbit outside for a fresh load of carrots? Or do you accept that virus is a part of our life like auto accidents or computer hackers or Cascadia rising — dangers we learn to live with and go on as best we can. Should we put ourselves or our clan first or exhaust ourselves trying to answer to both?

The intensity of Emotional Debt is higher than ever. Maybe it is merely a byproduct of my own age (Methuselah comes to mind) that I know so many people living tough with unanswerable problems that are tearing them apart. Problems that leave me feeling helpless. Bad moon on the rise.

The thing stripping away my emotional nuggets is the constant hate and hopelessness. We see the with the injustice of it all. I am upset so much of the time that eating dessert first is no longer a joke — it makes sense with so little time between calamities.

In 1867, Matthew Arnold wrote these final words to “Dover Beach”:

“And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.”

Strife isn’t new. It appears to be part of the human condition to destroy, and we refuse to let history teach us much at all. Hope for our future must come from the future, not the past.

Survival is up to fresh young faces. Meanwhile, I find myself turning inward to my local life to refill Emotional Debt with joy or laughter or empathy. Here such things can still exist and will sustain me until the bell tolls.

Linda B. Myers is a founding member of Olympic Peninsula Authors. Contact her at myerslindab@gmail.com.